Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  There was no irony in Gerry’s voice at all. It was as if he’d convinced himself that the woman he loved really was alive, that she was off at a dude ranch having a high old time. I looked at those kids, glassy-eyed with the hope of seeing their mother. Just the idea of a bunch of kids being dependent on me gave me the willies, let alone taking them down a road that would never lead to their mom.

  “I appreciate the offer,” I told Gerry, “but I’ll move faster alone.

  “Oh, it’s no bother,” Gerry said. “It’s no trouble. There’s not much for us here, and we’re happy to help pull some extra weight.”

  Wouldn’t those kids quit looking at me? I wasn’t the one who’d been feeding them lies. I didn’t electrocute anybody’s mother.

  “There’s no way,” I told him. “You can’t come. I’m finding my own old lady.”

  Gerry said, “Hey, who do you think just built your sled, Hanky?”

  Farley pulled up, dogs howling. Dad was in the litter. He threw me a handheld GPS tracker. “We don’t need maps,” he said. “The satellites still work.”

  “Dad, Farley,” I said, “I’m glad you’re here. Someone needs to tell this guy he’s not coming with me. Tell him this is a one-man mission.”

  When I looked at the sled Dad and Farley were driving, though, I could tell that it, too, was outfitted for travel through cold country.

  “Hey, there, now,” Farley told me. “We’re all coming with you, eh?”

  Dad shot me a look that said, Get real. “You can’t do this trip alone,” he said.

  I addressed all of them: “This trip will be long and perilous. There’ll be great obstacles, unforeseeable dangers, general loneliness, and little hope of success. I can’t ask anyone else to risk their lives. I can’t be responsible for that.”

  I was starting to scare the crap out of myself. Talk like that was really weirding me out. I had to get out of there; luckily, Trudy and Eggers were sledding up.

  Trudy set the snowbrake, and Eggers jumped up from the litter, wearing all his old Clovis gear. It was a nice show of solidarity. His richy-rich parka and perpetual watch had been replaced by buckskin breeches and a big Clovis coat.

  “Sorry we’re late,” Trudy said. “Last-minute shopping.”

  When I went to their sled, there weren’t any supplies.

  “Where are my provisions?” I asked. “What am I supposed to eat for the next two weeks?” On their sled were several shoe-boxes, and a whole raft of potato chips. “What is all this?” I asked, staring at the chips. They were suddenly incomprehensible to me.

  “Easy, Dr. Hannah,” Eggers said. “We got some goodies for you, too.”

  “I don’t want new sneakers,” I said. “I need staples. Rice and flour. Meat.”

  “You don’t need provisions,” Eggers said. “I lived for a year without provisions. We’ll find stuff along the way.”

  “I’ve got news for you,” I said. “You’re not going along,” I started rifling through the stuff they’d brought. There was a Frisbee, a box of dog treats, and a new set of barbecue tongs. “I can’t eat any of this,” I told them. I picked up a golf club. “What the heck is this?”

  “It’s only a nine iron,” Eggers said. “So I brought one club. So kill me.”

  There was a large sack from the pharmacy. I tore this open. It was filled with hundreds of little discs, each disc ringed with little white candies. “You brought candy? I asked you to do one simple thing like keep me from starving, and this is what you come up with?”

  Trudy snatched the bag from me. “These are my birth-control pills,” she said. “If I’m going to be the last woman on earth, I’m not taking any long trips unprepared.”

  Gerry said, “Hey, now, you’re not the last woman on earth.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “you’re not the last woman on earth. That’s what this trip is about. That’s what I’m about to kill myself trying to establish. But it doesn’t seem like anybody gives a crap about that. This is just a big picnic to some people.”

  Eggers lifted his hands. “What say we lighten up a little, Dr. Hannah? How about we go easy on the negativity? Maybe Trudy and I got a little carried away, but you’re really not one to talk when it comes to packing dogsleds. You’ve got about six hundred pounds of computer paper there, and that suitcase is designed for overhead bins, not long-distance mushing.”

  I walked to my sled and lifted the snowbrake. I said, “I’m sorry, but this is something I have to do. If I’ve misled anybody, I apologize. If I haven’t lived up to your expectations, well, so be it. I figure it will take me two weeks to find Yulia and at least two to get back, assuming the snowpack holds. Until then.”

  “Why are you taking Junior?” Trudy asked. “If you’re coming back, why are you taking your research with you?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that.

  I simply said, “I’ll see you in four weeks.”

  Farley threw a thumb toward the lake, though you couldn’t see anything through the falling snow. “If water starts coming over the dam,” he said, “it’s only a matter of time till the abutments erode. Town might not even be here in a month.”

  I stepped onto the sled runners. When I lifted my whip, the dogs stood.

  “Dr. Hannah,” Trudy said, “what’s wrong? What’s gotten into you?”

  “Listen to me,” my father said. “Do not do this.”

  Eggers came up to me. “People stick together,” he said. “Do you remember the night you taught me that? I didn’t know that. I’d made it to graduate school without learning that. You don’t turn your back on the people who need you. That’s what you said to me. Those are the words my own father never taught me.”

  “Yet you went off anyway,” I told him.

  “Well, I was wrong,” Eggers said.

  Gerry’s kids were giving me this spooky look. It was blank and expectant, and they were relentless with it. I had to leave right then, I had to get out of there while I still had an ounce of resolve, or I would simply crumple. I turned toward the river. I popped the whip, and held on tight when the sled lurched.

  “Dr. Hannah,” Eggers called after me, “this is a low-down and lonesome thing you’re doing.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Racing through the riverbed, I barely glanced at the corpses. I thought of them all together, as a single entity. You sad bastards, my mind said to them, you poor stooges. My vision was blurry. I kept wiping my eyes, but honestly, I couldn’t see a thing. “Hya,” I yelled. “Hya!”

  The snow had begun to settle in the Missouri bed, but it was thin, and believe me, you knew when the skids hit a “bump.” Here’s where all the dogs were, some lying casually across river-softened corpses, lifting their muzzles whenever they needed to horse down soft tissue, while others were recumbently engaged in digestive naps. When I raced through them, though, they took great interest, agitatedly charging me in little bluff-runs as I crossed the channel. They spread out into flanking lines that paced me on either side, just beyond my vision through the snow. I hadn’t gone a quarter-mile before my hamstrings were burning from holding on so tight. Every bump was a near spill. Each drift we punched through shook the pulp in my teeth.

  The thirteen canines that pulled my sled were terrified of the newly wild dogs, and soon I realized my prodding wasn’t needed—those dogs were mad to get out of that river of death. We emerged into the woods on the far bank, passing the ancient riverboat docks, and swinging wide around the great pipes of the county irrigation pumphouse. We entered thicker trees, and, to keep my mind off the madness I’d undertaken, I focused only on the snow, the runners, and the train of dogs ahead, curving through the trees. I could still hear wild dogs out there, echoing our movements. Their panting lope was unmistakable, and that devilish little language of theirs, the yips and whimpers they plotted their attack with, couldn’t have been more sinister.

  Before I describe the remainder of my journey, let me say, first, that I’d only worked with sleds for one da
y, and this was my inaugural experience driving a sled of this size. Second, the dogs were quite suspect to begin with. I’d detected more than a little passive-aggression in their eyes, and their disposition vacillated between longing for sweets, and fleeing with terror at the slightest development, let alone being hunted down by packs of their wild compatriots. Finally, and I’m sure this was an honest mistake, Gerry’s kids had managed to get a fair amount of wax on top of the skids, making the footing quite treacherous.

  We mushed through quiet fishing camps along the opposing rim of the lake, places where families had planted stands of white pine and spruce to freshen the air on their weekend stays. The occasional cabin, log-cut and compact, was the kind of retreat that I imagined the blind of South Dakota living in when I read to them over the radio. Cutting through an open meadow, I made out the bounding motions of a pack of dogs as they tried to box me against the water. Behind me I heard the gargly excitement of some beast. I kept looking over my shoulder, but I only made out rushes of fur through the trunks. If it was a chase dog or some kind of straggler, working on his own initiative, I could handle him, but if I was dealing with yet another pack, things could turn grim. Over my shoulder, I saw that, yes, about a hundred yards behind me, a full complement of dogs was closing.

  I turned forward just in time to see my dog team disappear under a low-hanging branch. It caught me square in the chest, and deposited me on my back in the snow. It felt as if the pine needles had brushed the skin off my face, and my cheeks burned with the witch hazel of pine resin. The tree hadn’t been a large one, and above me it swung from the impact, shaking off stiff clumps of snow. When I sat up, I saw the last of my vanishing sled and the wag of the dogs that pulled it.

  I heard a jingly-jangly sound. It was rhythmic and almost soothing.

  Usually when a pack of dogs is bounding headlong to maul you, you’re on higher ground or at least standing tall. Now I was at their eye level, and I saw them—nostrils wide, haunches rolling—as would a toddler in a playpen. Their bodies stretched and balled, dug and flew, and each time their paws clapped the snow, it sent a shudder through their fur. I remember thinking, How shimmering are these coats, how singularly they flow.

  I scrambled up the puny tree that had dethroned me. It really was a pitiful thing, leaning this way and that as I stepped from branch to branch. I couldn’t get more than six feet high without its threatening to topple. The mongrels surrounded the trunk, and, tails awag, began making fusillades at my feet. One black standard poodle had my number. Twice he latched on to my boot, and nearly brought me down by way of the rubber sole. Had I been wearing tennis shoes, all would have been lost. The dogs were quite active in their assaults on my ankles, but I grew brave enough to feel my ribs for breaks (none) and to look for signs of my sled (none). That dog team was out there, barreling on without me. What a sight it must have been. Imagine seeing that driverless sled charge toward you, led by a team of frothing, wild-eyed dogs running from the raw history of the last hundred thousand years, all charioteered onward by the hands of extinct humanity, hands that had at their grasp a whip, a bottle of bourbon, and the power to grant doctoral degrees.

  The dogs began making running starts to lunge farther up the tree. Then a sheepdog raised up and gave the trunk a bear hug. Its vocal cords had been snipped. It threw a tantrum of barks my way, yet all I heard was a hoarse, tracheal pant.

  “Ahoy,” I shouted into the woods.

  I pulled the Global Positioning System tracker out of my pocket. It was the size of a transistor radio, but it had no communications abilities that I could see. I turned it on. “Acquiring Satellites,” it flashed. On the screen came a depiction of our globe, with a flashing dot in the Northwestern Hemisphere. That was me. I pressed the zoom button. The flashing dot appeared on a map of North America. I pushed zoom again and again. I flashed in South Dakota, in Parkton County, and, to my dismay, I realized I was technically still within the city limits of Parkton. I pushed the mark-map button and put the thing away.

  Afternoon wore on, cold and still. The color spectrum shifted to dark green, with long shadows of dirty purple. An Airedale had done a ditty on my calf, and a collie drew blood. If you know the lonely sounds of wind vibrating your clotheslines or a gust cycling through a leaf-burning barrel, if you’ve heard the breeze play the bones on the rusty tines of an upturned fan rake, then you know where I was. You know what I saw when I gazed from that tree upon a birdless America. That’s the state I was in. That’s how low I was. The thought crossed my mind that it I was my coat that was driving these dogs mad, that they could smell the Pomeranian trim on cuffs and hood. It actually crossed my mind to take my coat off, the one thing I had left, the thing that Eggers and Trudy had made for me by hand, and throw it to the dogs in an effort to appease them. “What’s wrong? What’s gotten into you?” Trudy had asked me as I insisted on going off on my own. The question kept cycling in my mind.

  I’d never throw that coat to the dogs, but the GPS cartography had gotten me thinking. I loosened the top toggles on my coat and pulled it off, steamy and leather-smelling. I opened it and fanned it across the branches. There was a map of North America, embroidered by Trudy, with a star exactly where I was. And there, on the inside breast, was embroidered “Open in Case of Emergency.”

  I tore loose the stitching, and from this pocket removed a photo of Eggers, Trudy, and myself at last year’s Parents Weekend mixer, an affair to which none of our parents came. This was back when Trudy had just won her Peabody Fellowship, and Eggers, clad in a black suit, was about to begin his dissertation as a Clovis. I had to wipe my eyes with the back of a mitten. I dug deeper in the pocket and pulled out dental floss and Q-tips. My students knew me! They really knew me. But there was something else in the pocket. I withdrew a piece of buckskin, and before I even unfolded it I knew what it contained. I nodded my head. All this time, I thought. Through my prison stay and escape, through brown infernos and the harrows of ice, I had been carrying Keno’s spear point the whole time. It burned pink in my hands.

  Right away I got to work. I found a limb about an inch thick, and this I whittled from the trunk with the spear point. I stripped the small branches, cut a deep notch at the end, and, after seating the point, I secured it with several hundred wraps of floss. It didn’t take long for our four-legged friends to make another foray toward my legs, but now I was ready to redden a few muzzles.

  From deep within the woods came a voice. “Dr. Hannah,” it called.

  The dogs all turned to look.

  “Ahoy,” I shouted back. “Ahoy, ahoy!”

  Through the thickets came several dogsleds. Trudy and Eggers were in the lead, with Gerry and his kids on the next sled, followed by Farley and my father, mushing together. Driving up, Trudy dismounted with the momentum. She had a box of dog biscuits in her hand. Eggers set the brake and followed, brandishing the golf club. She slung the whole box of biscuits out, broadcasting them across the snow. Uniformly, the dogs went for them. Trudy walked toward me, shaking her head at my pathetic state. “Remember my pledge to aid you?” she asked. “Remember ‘no matter what engaged’? This one doesn’t count. This was too easy.”

  Eggers was laughing. “That is the saddest spear I have ever seen.”

  Trudy put a hand on her hip. “Dr. Hannah,” she said, “just about every decision you’ve made on your mission to rescue Yulia has ensured that we’d have to rescue you. Is that what you really wanted, for us to come save you? Well, here we are. We’ve dropped everything. We came for you. Next time, just ask. When this little trip is over, the real problems begin. That’s when I have to find a way to Okinawa.”

  I leapt from the tree. My legs had nearly gone to sleep up there. Leaning on the spear, I nodded to Trudy. That’s all I could do, nod that I understood.

  Eggers said, “Let’s get out of here before the biscuits wear off.”

  * * *

  We followed the tracks of my departed sled. Of its cargo, only three items had bounced f
ree along the trail: my university regalia, a bottle of bourbon, and a lone box of research, which, when I inspected it, turned out to be my most prized data—the Greenlandia Ice Sheet results. Fate is not always so cruel as she seems. The sled, it would turn out, was something we’d never see again. The dogs, I must presume, were lost. And the precious research remains at large, waiting for your discovery and excavation, my colleagues of the next millennium.

  We broke camp a few miles upstream. There were cabins and fishing lodges in the woods, but we passed them by. Who could rest on such sofas? Who could approach coffee tables laden with dog-eared Christmas catalogues and half-sipped cups of herbal tea? We stopped in a clearing near the bottleneck of the lake, and our camp consisted of parking the sleds in a circle, igniting a green fire, and staring at each other as we ate from cold tins of franks and beans, which were Gerry’s contribution to the endeavor.

  We were too indifferent to unharness the dogs, and we watched blankly as Gerry’s kids played a game called “school bus,” whose only rule was a three-elbow limit. Farley had brought a complement of five-gallon buckets. These we sat on, hands extended toward the cold fire. It was late afternoon, still an hour till dusk, yet already dark thoughts had set upon us. Each person, you could tell, was taking stock.

  Farley asked, of no one in particular, “Is a puffin a penguin?”

  Eggers said, “A puffin’s an aquatic bird, but they’re different somehow. I think puffins live in Iceland, while your typical penguin is Antarctic.”

  “Well, they’re birds that live in the middle of nowhere, right?” Farley asked. “Surely the penguins are okay, way down in Antarctica. How could the puffins be gone, out there in Iceland?”

  Dad said, “How about parrots, deep in the jungle?”

  Gerry said, “I’ve been thinking. There are a lot of missile silos in North Dakota. People go down in those things for months at a time. I bet there are scads of people down there. I bet they don’t even know what happened.”